Decolonizing a Food System: Freedom Farmers' Market as a Place for Resistance and Analysis

Abstract

Oakland's Freedom Farmers' Market is more than a venue for food exchange; it is a gathering place for Black cultural expression and economics. More often than not, Black farmers are shut out and even pushed out of mainstream farmers markets. However, fresh food and Black farmers are celebrated at the Freedom Farmers' Market each week. This commentary discusses the critical ways in which this market represents a social discourse about decolonizing our food system. Embedded within this place analysis is also, necessarily, a critique of the dominant places people currently have available for food. The Freedom Farmers' Market has become a model for disenfranchised peoples to take control of their own food system.

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FEATURED JAFSCD SHAREHOLDER

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Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona

The mission of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona is to integrate social, behavioral, and life sciences into interdisciplinary studies and community dialogue regarding change in regional food systems. We involve students and faculty in the design, implementation, and evaluation of pilot interventions and participatory community-based research in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands foodshed surrounding Tucson, a UNESCO-designated City of Gastronomy, in a manner that can be replicated, scaled up, and applied to other regions globally.

Public Lecture by Carlton Turner, Lead Artist/Director of Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture)

In this talk, Carlton Turner will use the work of Sipp Culture as a framework for how rural communities are grappling with reimagining their cultural identity in the wake of systems consolidation (in educational, medical, and food systems) and expansion of the digital divide across race and class lines.

Carlton Turner works across the country as a performing artist, arts advocate, policy shaper, lecturer, consultant, and facilitator. He is the founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture), which uses arts and agriculture to support rural community, cultural, and economic development in his hometown of Utica, Mississippi.

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Why are we a shareholder of JAFSCD? It’s simple. The Center for Environmental Farming Systems and NC State Extension share the same goals as JAFSCD in promoting research-based strategies that simultaneously minimize food insecurity and farm loss and maximize community resilience.

—Dr. Nancy Creamer, Director, Center for Environmental Farming Systems, North Carolina State University

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development is published by the Thomas A. Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems, a project of the Center for Transformative Action (a nonprofit affiliate of Cornell University). JAFSCD is published with the support of these shareholding partners: